Hey, it’s a little bit late, but I do have some pictures from my outing at Anime North last weekend.

Mami, Madoka and Kyubey. Don’t listen to him, ladies!

Master Chief and Iron Man share a fistbump.

Asuna(Kirito strangely absent)

I’ve got more, but can’t figure out how to get them off of my phone in a manner that isn’t prohibitively expensive. Perhaps if I can find that USB cable…

Things I’ve been watching/reading

Sword Art Online: I loathe MMORPGs, but I have to admit they make for pretty good drama here. So far they’ve resisted the all the massive temptations for filler that a setting like this must provide (“here, have ten episodes of Kirito grinding to level 50, plus a tournament arc”).

Trigun: I forgot how much I liked westerns. Nice soundtrack. All the shootouts get a tad repetitive, though.

Star Trek Into Darkness: It was fun, but I’m a little bit disappointed that the new movies seem to be settling with riffing off of plotlines from the original. I suppose that Trek lore has become so dense that new entries just get sucked into its gravity.

Harry Potter: I reread the first two books this week. Last time I was a wee lad, and I have to say that they hold up nicely. This time around I’m noticing how these stories are basically very clever whodunits. I never read the last three books, as I was entering my, “I’m too cool for this” phase when they were published.

Starfleet and Hogwarts are both institutions where brazenly defying the proper authorities and breaking the rules won’t actually harm your career in the slightest is you happen to be Awesome. It gets a bit grating after a while. I always find myself sympathizing a lot more with the Spocks and Hermiones of fictional worlds like these.